Your business model is being disrupted…

Most companies don’t realize it yet, but their business model is being corrupted… disrupted. Competitors come from area’s you would never expect them to come from. Hotels nowadays compete with private homes that are rented out through Air BNB, the taxi industrie compete with people driving people in their privately owned cars. Will energy companies soon loose their business to private energy providers? What can companies and their employees do to stop being a victim of continuous change and the accelerating speed of it…? How can you become a game changer like – for instance – Red Bull was in the nineties? There is a simple five-step program for that, which supports continuous change (or progress as I call it).

It all starts with exploring your current business playground and recognizing the most important (potential) players… Once you know who will play a role on your playground, you can uncover if their influence is growing or declining and whether that is good or bad. What you then do in detail will be explained in our GameStorm Trooper training on 13 & 14 September. The next steps are: determine the…

Purpose of the most important players and define how your organization can contribute to that

Players: who are they? And what drives their actions? In other words, what do they want, know, able to and dare to do on the professional playground?

Proces: which key processes determine your progressive growth (or decline) in other words: which actions can lead to synergy regarding your turn-over and costs.

Performance: how well do you do? Versus competitors, versus last years, versus your power?

Play: last but not least: if you underperform as an organization? How can you change the way people work, or actually: how can employees change their way of working?

The answer lies in the GameStorm methodology that I developed in 2012, which has been played by over 1.000 professionals since then. It helps companies to support employees to continuous change their routine in a fun and functional manner. Change is inevitable but often perceived as annoying. Therefore we make it fun to start with (and effective in the long run). The GameStorm uses game mechanics that make most games so addictive, like setting a goal, defining obstacles, providing players with dilemma’s (they have to make choices), voting on actions and calculating the impact of their old and new behavior. The GameStorm helped over 100 companies to transform their challenges into change and create perpetual progress by executing it each fiscal quarter. If you want to know how we do this, join the Gamification Academy and get an official certificate and start playing around with problems! More information can be found here.

Afraid to be disrupted? Organize for flexibility!

About the necessary transformation from organizational pyramids to processing power for similar purposes…

I was doing research for my new book ‘Playing on the job’ (working title) when I stumbled upon this picture of how a kingdom worked in the middle ages and concluded that this is actually how a lot of organizations (and countries) still work. Where a pyramid is actually a solid structure that can last for centuries – as an organizational structure it is far from ideal. For some reason we just never seem to have found an alternative in the past centuries and even decades. One of the main reasons for this is the internal obstacles that need to be overcome… The most dominant obstacles I discovered during my research are:

organizational structure

systems / software

lack of support (from either management or employees) to change, often caused by the ruling company culture.

Why organizational change is so hard to achieve is that in most cases the current structure is perceived as solid and the software and systems (compliance, legal, business rules, KPI’s) keep the structure in it’s place. If not the structure and systems, the lack of support ensures that the desired change will actually never take place. You could say that change will never happen if the culture doesn’t allow it to happen.

Inspired by games and game mechanics I’ve come up with a new structure that might help organizations to transform, continuously and infinitely. It all starts with defining the purpose on different levels:

Purpose or mission for the entire organization

Objective for a business unit or department

Goals for individual business leaders, managers or category members

Challenges for employees

We often see that different departments have different KPI’s. If you create islands in your organization and hold them accountable for different KPI’s they will never work together, let alone help each other to achieve those challenges, goals or objectives. If you make all departments responsible for the same / similar goals they most likely will help each other…

During my years in advertising we developed a lot of ‘brand books’ explaining the brand values and positioning of a particular company or brand. Of course it also described the purpose (or mission) of the company. What we never did was explaining how these values or how the main purpose could work or how they were relevant for individual departments or employees. The main thing that drives people in life is purpose, often fueled by curiosity and lust for more… (better, faster, stronger).

So a pyramid is an excellent structure in terms of building a long lasting organization, given that you align purpose with objectives, goals and challenges. However to overcome those challenges and to be able to achieve the set goals and objectives, a pyramid is terrible structure to work with. Especially in this digital age where the internet and international scale of the economy forces organizations to become more agile, lean and responsive a new way of ‘organizing’ is needed. So how can you organize for flexibility?

Inspired by games I came up with the following evolution which could lead to a revolution in your organization and help you to withstand disruption. Instead of working in a hierarchic structure, managers (and employees) should work around in a processes that supports the purpose in the pyramid. So to organize for flexibility companies should transform from a hierarchic / pyramid structure to a process oriented structure. I gave an example below for the sales process.

A CEO wants to have happy clients. This can be achieved by building an appealing brand (C), which is the CMO’s task. To be able to build a strong brand and make clients happy, the company needs to have the right information about the clients needs and whereabouts (i). If that is all in place, the Chief Commercial Officer can sell the right, relevant products to the right clients within the right context (time and place) through the right channels.Instead of communicating these KPI’s in a hierarchic way (top down), you should look for the interdependent relationship of these KPI’s as a process. In other words: how can an appealing brand gather information on and create customer insights that lead to better products and eventually more sales? Instead of rewarding departments for individual objectives, you can reward all contributors to the process equally for their efforts or effect on the process.

If you want me to explain how this could work for your organization, send an email to Bart at BrandNewGame (dot com ;-).

Our Agile ‘Game Plan’

This summer, I will speak about my new business model at Scrum Day Europe in Amsterdam and Agile Greece Conference in Athens. The business model I invented is derived from computer games and game mechanics. Really? Yes really. But a lot of these mechanics can also be found in scientific models, loads of management books and are often part of agile and lean methodologies. Let’s say I applied ‘game thinking’ or gamification to organizational thinking. It’s apparent that organizations are forced to continuously change their mix of people and properties in order to remain relevant to their buyers, consumers and users. It takes a lot of energy commitment and guts to transform whole organizations. Not many people are willing to change, not even capable or just scared that change might lead to undesired consequences (losing their job or sense of control). In fact, when I was in the proces of uncovering why people do or do not undertake necessary actions, fear is often the most dominant factor. Taking actions that change the way you work, live or a complete organizations need: willingness, knowledge, physical action and the right amount of guts. In other words, change needs:

Want to

Know what to

Able to

Dare to

It requires the right amount of drive and motivation to make people want to change. Then they should know what to do to start the change. Then they should be enabled (given the right amount of freedom or responsibility and necessary means) to physically act in the right direction with decisiveness and power. And finally… if the three mentioned previous elements are executed well, they will feel comfortable making that change. If not, they need to be pushed over the edge by management or colleagues. You can do that by making the first step incredibly easy, fun and measurable to be able to celebrate succes shortly after. We call this: play! If you consider change, playing around – it’s not so scary anymore. Call it an experiment, call it an alternative. Challenge people daily to achieve the same goal in a different way and see what they come up with.

Oftentimes change management is perceived as being a ‘project’ or a temporary thing. But change is constant. You might say that the CEO should be the Change Executive Officer. He should lead the change as change should be the primary drive of every organization, at least when change is the equivalent of: improvement. Each CEO should look at his organization day in-day out thinking: what can we do different today that will change the world tomorrow. We are successful doing what we do now, but what will deliver more success tomorrow? You need to ‘level up’ each time you successfully went through all states of the process. From an MVP, to a version 2.0, to 2.1, etc. If you know 50% of all product introductions fail, because companies look at it as a failure. It’s just version 1.0 … now improve. F.A.I.L. stands for: First Attempt In Learning…

The business model I developed as part of the Game Plan consists of four processes that each organization should manage. These processes are:

Thinking process

Making process

Selling process

Improvement process

I suggest the CEO is responsible for process No. 4. The commercial officer should take care of No. 3, the COO or No. 2 and the CIO (or R&D) of No. 1. Instead of organizing them in teams under the CEO, they should all be part of the same main process. It’s a continuous cycle, not a solid structure of people managing a department with different KPI’s. We can only build pyramids with similar purposes, but we should not organize people in pyramids. We should organize people around processes (oud = old, nieuw = new).

They all strive to do better next time, so the only KPI is sales or profit. Increase profit, by increasing turnover and reducing (relative) costs. In the following picture you can see that if the same CEO, CMO, CTO and CCO work together in the same process, you can actually expect that to work together even though their KPI is different. Happy customers and employees deliver a good brand equity and NPS. Analyzing and listening to your clients and employees delivers great ideas for new sales opportunities, you can deliver according to their needs if you listen well enough and increase sales, etc.

The Game Plan that I have developed is based on 100+ management books and uses game mechanics that most successful games use. It consists of the following five P’s (that are interdependent):

People on your playground

Purpose pyramid of your key players

Process

Performance

Play (how can we make the necessary functionalities more fun)

We developed several tools that can improve your process and performance significantly. Amongst them are the GameStorm and the Progress Loop method. These are all proven and in-house developed methods that BrandNewGame exclusively offers to their clients and licensed partners. You can read about them in my new book ‘Playing on the job’ (due in 2017) or come to the seminars I speak upcoming year! First up are:

Progress Loop presentation in Sarajevo

In 2015 I was invited to speak during Bosnia Agile Day in Sarajevo. It was a wonderful experience and I got to test the vision I have on using ‘game thinking’ in a company-wide perspective. The model in my new book ‘Playing on the job’ (due in 2017) is called the Progress-Loop and will be explained in the presentation below. Enjoy and share it on Twitter #gamification. If you have any questions about it, send me a tweet @barthufen

Gamification of Business

On October 17th 2015, I was invited to give a presentation about gamification of businesses and organizations. Particularly I disclosed the essence of my new book “Playing on the Job” (out in 2016 I hope) – my main model – the ‘Loop of Progress’. The idea of the ‘Loop of Progress’ is that you identify which concurrent processes lead to synergie in your organization and create multi-disciplinairy teams to take part in those processes, rather than letting departments do that. Inspired from FarmVille – I started rethinking business processes and business models, from understanding the gameloop and other game mechanics and applying them to your daily business. In this presentation I explain our GameStorm tool – that we use to develop our serious games and help to start making a change in organizations like the City of Amsterdam, Foot Locker Europe and Vodafone. And – of course – I elaborate on the ‘Loop of Progress’…

Twitch: gamers watching gamers playing games

In the year 2000, being a product manager at Atari (formally know as Infogrames) I organized one of the first online game competitions in the Benelux with a real-life finale called ‘Gamer of the Year’. Thanks to the support of Clanbase we managed to start with an on-line competition amongst players of Unreal Tournament – one of the games in my portfolio. After the on-line pre-rounds, we held a grand finale in Antwerp, sponsored by Diesel and Red Bull, for the 64 best players in the Benelux. I never expected that e-sports would take off after that – and for a long time – it actually didn’t. Sure, there were a lot of tournaments going on on-line and offline (LAN-Parties) using games like Quake, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike and later Call of Duty, but never on a global scale and with the financial support it deserved. Since 2013 however, this all changed. I guess it all accelerated thanks to Twitch.tv founded in 2011.
Twitch is an online streaming video service where gamers can watch gamers playing games. To be honest I never saw the fun in that, but nowadays it is so popular that Twitch is in the Top 10 websites responsible for the most data traffic in the world, alongside Amazon, Facebook and Google… The first company – Amazon – bought Twitch recently for a little under ONE BILLION DOLLARS ! Can you imagine that a video streaming service, launched four years ago has generated so much interest in four years time that it is worth that much money?! How much is one billion dollars spread over four years of days or hours…? Well… it’s $ 694.444,- per day… Or a little under $ 30.000 per hour in the past four years. So Twitch is huge – and online gaming is huge. Games like Candy Crush (less hardcore than Call of Duty maybe), are being played by 50 million people on Facebook – and by estimate – another 50 million people play it on their mobile phones. A game like DOTA2 (more hardcode than Candy Crush 😉 is being played by one million gamers every day. Defense of the Alliance 2, originally a modification for Warcraft 3 is a favorite amongst gamers that participate in competitions. Why don’t you take a wild guess, how much prize money was available in 2015 during the finals of a DOTA2 competition in China. I will state the answer below – not to spoil your fun of guessing. The winning team ‘Evil Geniuses’ (from the USA) left the battle field with more than six million dollars to give you a feeling about the seriousness of playing games as e-sports athlete these days. Companies often ask if gaming is big – and how big it is. Well, if I tell you that the average football players in Europe earn less than three million if you play in the Premier League (UK) and a meagre €300.000 in The Netherlands… you might want to switch to playing digital games… The total prize money of the finals of The International 2015 was 18 million dollars. Apart from the money, the fanbase is so involved and committed that cinema’s organize live finals where gamers gather to view their heroes! Will that be the future of cinema’s…? Proving a theater for watching gamers playing games…? It just might…

Presentations – upcoming Q4 2015

For all you globetrotters that want to meet me in person, here’s a quick overview of upcoming events where I will talk about my biggest hobby: games in relationship with brand- / marketing- and (change) management.

Join me on the following dates in the following locations for a sneak preview about me new book:

Q&A With Jane McGonigal

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) interviewed researcher, game designer and author Jane McGonigal. Her newest book, “SuperBetter,” which releases September 15, explores a decade’s worth of scientific research into the ways games—including video games, sports and puzzles—change how people respond to stress, challenges and pain and how to cultivate new powers of recovery and resilience in everyday life simply by adopting what McGonigal calls a more gameful mindset. Read the interview below – with a big thanks to ESA for sharing!

Please briefly introduce yourself and your work.

I’m a researcher, author and game designer who has spent the past 15 years trying to prototype and provide scientific evidence for the ways in which games can help us become the best versions of ourselves: happier, braver, more resilient, better problem-solvers and better allies to our friends and family.

Most recently, my work has focused on how games can improve mental and physical health. There’s a rapidly growing body of evidence in the scientific literature that ordinary video games can be a powerful tool for treating depression, anxiety and even chronic pain. I’ve spent the past five years researching this topic – I’ve read literally more than 1,000 studies in the fields of neuroscience, psychology and medicine.

Now, I’m publishing my “SuperBetter” book to help get this entire, emerging field of research into the hands of the game-playing public and also game developers. I want the public to understand how video games can be played with purpose – that is, with the knowledge that you’re not just having fun, but you’re also developing important psychological resources, like creativity, determination, optimism, curiosity and resilience in the face of setbacks. And I want game developers to understand how to make games that bring even more of these benefits to their players.

How did you first become interested in working with video games?

That’s a very long story that starts with me researching and making games as a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, although I guess it starts even earlier, when I was 10 years old and designed my first video game with ASCII art on a Commodore 64 computer.

But the really pivotal experience for me, more recently, in guiding me to the work I’m doing today was the mild traumatic brain injury that I suffered in 2009. Thirty-four days after the injury, I decided to try to bring my game designer skills to the problem, and I invented a game to help my brain heal and to deal with the severe depression and anxiety.

That has been a real turning point in my game development career, as that game (SuperBetter) has now been used by half a million people to improve their mental and physical health and has created some amazing research opportunities for me with organizations like the National Institutes of Health. All of this has convinced me that game design is going to be one of the most important areas of research and discovery in medicine and clinical psychology over the next decade.

What excites you most in your day-to-day job?

Data! Scientific data is what excites me. Every time a new study on the real-life impact of gameplay comes out, I devour it.

Even more exciting is doing original research and seeing the results. For example, with SuperBetter, we’ve done two major studies so far. First, a randomized, controlled study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania found that playing SuperBetter for 30 days significantly reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety, and increases optimism, social support and players’ self-confidence. The study also found that people who followed the SuperBetter rules for one month were significantly happier and more satisfied with their lives.

More recently, a clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted at Ohio State University Medical Research Center and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital found that the SuperBettergame improves mood, decreases anxiety and suffering, and strengthens family relationships during traumatic brain injury rehabilitation and recovery. Honestly, there is nothing more exciting than getting solid scientific evidence that a game you’ve made is changing people’s lives and helping them get happier and healthier from extremely difficult challenges.

Note from myself: It is interesting to see that Jane is addressing the four quadrants I always use to determine our key drives for game design: physical, mental, emotional and social elements. You can find them in the handouts (slide 34) for the Gamification Workshop presentation on this page. Of course these are based on the Insights model, which are based on Quinn… But I guess we – as human beings – are always looking for rational (mental), physical, emotional (social) and spiritual challenges: or active and passive events. Often spiritual is left out in favor of social. Maybe social can be the opposite of spiritual? Spiritual meaning: inside my mind, where as social means: outside my mind in interaction with others…?

Where do you see video games in 10 years? What broader applications across society can we expect in games’ future?

A decade from now, ordinary video games will be understood as an important tool in creating mental health and well-being. I forecast with very high confidence that games will be used to treat depression, anxiety, pain and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a complement to, or in many cases be prescribed in lieu of, pharmaceutical treatment.Note from myself: Obviously Jane is talking about serious games here. Since 2010 we have published a lot of serious games in for companies like Foot Locker Europe and NN Global. Unfortunately we cannot disclose all of our projects online, but the ones we are allowed to talk (and write) about can be found on our project page.

What is your favorite video game and why?

I’ll go with the scientific literature here again, and say that Tetris has been the most extensively studied game for accomplishing everything from preventing flashbacks after witnessing a trauma – so it could be used as a cognitive vaccine against PTSD; to reducing cravings for cigarettes and junk food by 25 percent – so it can be used as a tool in behavior change and fighting addiction; to creating the same blood flow patterns in the brain as meditation – so it can be used to improve attention and improve the body’s ability to recover from stress.

Everyone should have Tetris on their phone. We should have PSAs explaining how to use it for all of these benefits. And I’m ready to give Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov the Nobel Prize in Games.